A Panpsychist Hypothesis (General)

by dhw, Wednesday, June 18, 2014, 13:05 (3810 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: But you are offering us the seemingly illogical premise that your first cause pure energy already had the information necessary to create the materials of universe and life before it had even experienced its own transformation into matter. -DAVID: Whoa! My first cause energy is God, and God is not matter. Matter is the stuff that appered after God used the information to instruct the first particles how to form and join together to create the first matter.-That is precisely my point. When you say "instruct the first particles how to create matter", you are making it sound as if the particles existed separately from God himself ... but according to you, God IS those particles of energy, because he is the first cause. Nothing else existed, and matter IS energy. So how could first cause pure energy (your God) have acquired the information to create the materials of the universe and life before it had even transmuted itself into matter?
 
dhw: However, you have in recent posts acknowledged two possible scenarios which you preferred to dismiss earlier: 1) that your pure energy God may have experimented, 
DAVID: The experimentation I suggested might have occurred was during evolution, a path God chose for the development of humans.-If your God experimented in order to produce humans, he clearly did not have total knowledge of what was needed. I am offering the same get-out from the logical trap you have set yourself by claiming that God had all the information about matter before matter (made by transmuting his own particles) even existed.
 
dhw: 2) that he may have created universes prior to this one.
DAVID: If God has been around forever, then he, more than likely, has created universes before.-Which would have enabled him to acquire more and more information. Part of the logical get-out I am suggesting.-dhw: That at least would get you out of the impossible dream of a DVD loaded with information before the information exists. -DAVID: The information exists with God within his intelligence. It is obvious that life uses a massive amount of information. It didn't develop by chance.-That is not the question here. The question is how your God acquired the information before he experienced himself as matter (see my first paragraph). Although you always claim that you do not endow your God with any attributes, you are insisting that he planned and knew everything needed to create our universe and life. This is the conventional image of an omniscient, omnipotent God. Why are you not prepared to consider the possibility of a God that had to acquire by experience the information needed to make universes and life?
 
dhw: But of course if you agree that your God had to learn as he went along, you will find yourself in the difficult position of acknowledging that his intelligence is not unlike our own: potential rather than actual, until it gains information and learns how to use it. And once you agree to that, you could find yourself on the slippery slope to my panpsychist hypothesis. Ah, Heaven forbid!
DAVID: It is your slope, not mine, and a sloppy, slimey, slippery one at that.-As with evolution, you can dismiss the atheistic version of the hypothesis, but you are still left with an alternative version of your God: instead of the know-it-all-from-the beginning God, we have one who ... just like ourselves ... has to develop his intelligence through experience. Why is even this slope more sloppy, slimy and slippery than your own?